THE GOSPEL OF VIOLENCE by David Kingdon, A Significant Booklet Published by Carey Publications, 5 Fairford Close, Haywards Heath, Sussex RH16 3EF (England), 16pp. $1.50.

Since the Reformation there has been some difference of conviction as to whether a Christian must continue to submit even to a bad government as “the ordinance of God,” as William Tyndale maintained, or whether he must resist and seek to overthrow a wicked and tyrannical government as the servant of the devil, as John Knox and John Milton argued. Today an influential group of theologians are advocating not merely resistance to tyrannical

This contemporary “theology of revolution” has arisen out of especially these factors. The postcolonial era has not brought freedom to the masses. The expectations of the poor have been raised. Modern technology has destroyed the idea that grinding poverty is inevitable. Marxism has provided a tool for guiding revolutionary action. And many Christians have seen in the Bible elements which can be used to frame a theology of revolution.

Today it has become fashionable for the Church, or large parts of it, to support revolutionary “liberation” movements. They often seek Biblical grounds for such support in (1) God’s deliverance of His people in the Exodus, (2) drawing an analogy between Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection and revolutionary struggles (“The Cuban or Vietnamese revolution is a type of the resurrection in the sense that we speak of Old Testament events as types of Christ.”), (3) portraying Jesus as a revolutionary Zealot, (4) interpreting Biblical salvation as social and worldly revolution and (5) identifying such social revolution with the Christian “hope.”

This “theology of revolution” has a strong popular appeal especially in countries in which there are extreme differences between rich and poor and many obvious injustices. Despite the efforts to find Biblical arguments to support the revolutionary movement, it is evident at many points that this movement did not arise out of Biblical Christianity but that it necessarily brings its adherents into conflict with it. The promoters of revolution have lost faith in the influence of God’s Word and Spirit and substitute for it reliance on the violent use of human power. Their trust in violence and appeals to what is expedient, produce injustices. Their commitment to the ruthless use of power flatly contradicts the gospel’s injunctions to love our neighbors and to forgive. The Lord Himself rejected the popular revolutionary political movements of the New Testament times. The revolutionary belief that the new man and the new society can be created out of human violence is not Christian. The Christian faith is not in human violence but in the grace of God in Christ. The Christian anticipates “the new Jerusalem which, in contradistinction from all revolutionary Utopias, comes down from God out of Heaven.”

This in general is the line of argument of this fascinating 15-page booklet which deals in an unusually clear and convincing manner with a movement that seems to be gaining strength in our time. We see a number of indications of its influence within as well as outside of our churches. Some of the foreign mission reports, discussions about world hunger and relief and reports about academic discussions suggest that there is growing sympathy also among us for this “liberation” theology. David Kingdon’s little booklet may help us to understand and counteract a misguided movement.

A Recurring Problem

In trying to deal fairly and effectively with this currently urgent problem of the popular “liberation” or “revolutionary” movement, we ought to notice first that this is not, as many think, a new problem. It has many close similarities to the French Revolution of the late 1700s. Current cries against injustices, and economic inequalities, and for “liberation” and the restructuring of society, and the resort to violence to achieve such goals all parallel what happened in France. That revolution, it may be recalled, far from producing the envisioned Utopia of the philosophers, speedily degenerated into successively more bloody “reigns of terror,” until a weary and disillusioned people eagerly welcomed Napoleon, the dictator, who restored law, order and public safety.

It is a curious fact that England, whose society had many of the same abuses which provoked revolution in France, did not undergo the bloody tragedy of France. Its gross abuses were to a considerable degree rectified in a much more constructive and orderly way. What accounted for the difference between developments in the two adjacent and similar countries? D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones in his Sermon on the Mount (Vol. 1, p. 157 on Matt. 5:13, the “salt of the earth” passage) wrote

Most competent historians are agreed in saying that what undoubtedly saved this country from a revolution such as was experienced in France at the end of the eighteenth century was nothing but the Evangelical Revival. This was not because anything was done directly, but because masses of individuals had become Christian, and were living this better life and  had this higher outlook. The whole political situation was affected, and the great Acts of Parliament which were passed in the last century were mostly due to the fact that there were such large numbers of individual Christians to be found in this land.

Anyone who wishes to explore this fascinating subject further may profitably turn to the French historian, M. Halevy’s, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century (Vol. 1, p. 387ff.). He wrote of the evangelical revival, “We shall attempt to find here the key to the problem whose solution has hitherto escaped us; for we shall explain by this movement the extraordinary stability which English Society was destined to enjoy throughout a period of revolution and crises; what we may truly term the miracle of Modern England . . . .” (cf. also pp. 424, 425).

If one asks the further question, “Why did France experience no such revival?” one ready answer is that France had long since destroyed or driven out its evangelical Christians, the Huguenots, since the massacre of St. Bartholomew.

“Anti-Revolutionary” Christians

Our socially conscious Christians of today who find themselves attracted to or pressured by the revolutionary (or “liberation” propaganda appeal to their social conscience might profitably learn from our Dutch forebears who, driven by an equally keen sense of social responsibility, but directed and motivated by the Biblical gospel, established an “Anti–revolutionary Party” and movement to counteract what they correctly saw was the antiChristian popular revolutionary movement. The fact that their anti–Revolutionary party has now, after a hundred years, largely capitulated to the enemy and disbanded should not prevent us, who are faced by essentially the same problem, from studying and profiting by the Biblical and historical lessons the Lord taught our predecessors.

We need more, and more extensive, studies of the kind David Kingdon gives us in his criticism of “the gospel of violence.”